U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock on Monday cautioned against a policy on foreign aid that confuses “America First” with “America Only” as he praised the work of a Georgia-based nonprofit group that manufactures vitamin-fortified, peanut-based packets of food to treat acute malnutrition among children abroad.
At a sprawling, 315,000-square-foot production and storage facility in Pooler operated by Mana Nutrition, Warnock said the group’s purchase of 2 million pounds of peanuts a month from Georgia farmers and employment of 100 Georgians showed that “even as they are nourishing hungry children all over the world, they are nourishing the Georgia economy.”
In remarks to reporters, Warnock, who was born and raised in Savannah, criticized the view, widely held among “America First” supporters of President Trump and opponents of U.S. foreign aid, that the people of the U.S. must choose between taking care of their own or saving those in foreign lands.
“Very often people have this false dichotomy where they’re saying, either we’re supporting America or we’re supporting those people ‘over there,’” he said. “Mana is a great example of ways in which, when we invest in this, we are investing in” Georgia.
In April, as Elon Musk and the Trump administration took a chainsaw to U.S. foreign aid and the agency that oversees it, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Warnock said he phoned U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to urge the administration to pay its outstanding debt of $18.6 million to Mana for so-called ready-to-use therapeutic food that the government had already purchased and had been produced.
He and Mana officials said Monday the bill had been paid.
According to Warnock and Mark Moore, Mana’s co-founder and CEO, the secretary of state has indicated a willingness on the part of the administration to fund production of the organization’s lifesaving peanut paste at its Pooler plant as well as one in Fitzgerald, in south-central Ben Hill County.
The amount of the government’s funding was, the one-term senator said Monday, the subject of “continuing negotiation.”
Warnock, a Democrat, is not the only Georgia lawmaker to intervene on Mana’s behalf.
Moore on Monday also credited U.S. Reps. Buddy Carter and Austin Scott, both Republicans, for their help in restoring cancelled contracts in February.
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